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Weak, she repeats to herself. Weak, weak, weak.
She doesn’t know if she’s saying it out loud or not – frankly, she doesn’t care. She’s already lost one member of her family already, and the confirmation that said loss won’t be her only one is in her hands, marked in black ink and pithy apologia. We regret to inform you that your husband, Rudolph Holiday, will pass in one week’s time. Our deepest and most sincere apologies to you and your family in this time of tragedy.
She doesn’t need them, anyhow. She hasn’t needed Rudy since he’d gotten sick, since she’d decided it was better to be distant than to let herself get hurt again by the inevitability of loss. She’d given up her dreams in the big city for him back in college, for this haunted hick town, and look where that’d gotten her – here, staring at another piece of paper proclaiming another loss. It’s shameful – she knows well enough by now she doesn’t lose. She knows what’s best for herself and for Noelle – for the only daughter she has left.
(Be back in the morning stares up at her from her desk. It’s taunting her. It hits the play button on the tape recording called memory, “you can’t come in here, Noelle,” and the sound of a quickly-closed door.)
She won’t tell Noelle, of course – she’s not-told-Noelle plenty of times before, because if Noelle knew, her grief would light this town up like a firecracker. Noelle doesn’t know that she needs to spend more time at the office than at home to keep this town from any more phantom disappearances, Noelle doesn’t know that December is as good as dead because she left, Noelle doesn’t know that her mother wishes there was some way she could take her out of this Angel-damned town and find a place where she doesn’t have to keep watch over everyone like they’re her subjects and she is nothing more than a lone queen of ice.
Well – almost lone.
“Aren’t you going to go home?” she asks, pointedly, and pushes back from her desk. The chair squeaks across the polished wooden floors and makes the man standing on the other side of the (claustrophobic, he’s called it, though he’d added quickly that was just the way he liked things) office. She glances up at the clock. “It’s 10PM.”
“AREN’T YOU?” Papyrus asks back, turning to her with an undeniable look of concern. Always in for the kill, that one – not intentionally, though, of course. Carol appreciates the fact that he doesn’t mind saying what he thinks needs to be said. It’s one of the many reasons why she’s allowed her council to push an assistant on her in the first place. Unlike the rest of the town, Papyrus doesn’t need her protection – he’s the closest thing she’s got to a confidante, and although she won’t let him get under her skin, the part of her that craves some form of connection beyond the temporary ones she calls her family does more than just tolerate his presence. “YOU’VE BEEN STAYING LATER AND LATER EVERY DAY!!” he continues, making his way over to her and moving the rest of the papers on her desk into a tidy pile.
“Right,” she nods, exhaling sharply through her nose. Her breath mists in the chill of the air around her. “Your concern is appreciated, Papyrus, but I assure you I’m simply attending to my duties as mayor,” she assures him, though the words feel false on her tongue. With a child, it’s enough to be vague. With her assistant –
“AND I’M SIMPLY ATTENDING TO MY DUTIES AS YOUR ASSISTANT,” Papyrus counters. “I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT STILL NEED ME AROUND, SO AROUND I STAYED. BESIDES, I’VE GOTTEN A LOT OF WORK DONE!!” He puffs out his chest proudly, gesturing to the generous pile of papers on one side of his desk. There isn’t much more she could’ve given him to keep him from picking up on her distress – there aren’t really any other towns to delegate with, and so Papyrus had been tasked with managing the nigh-comical amount of rent payments one Asgore Dreemurr still needed to pay up for. “YOU’VE JUST BEEN STARING AT THE MAIL ALL DAY.” He pokes a finger at the paper still clutched in her hands, and she reflexively pulls it closer to her chest.
“Don’t touch that–” Carol snaps, a bit harsher that she would’ve liked. Papyrus takes a step back, his eyes flashing with the two-and-two-together of the situation, and she quickly holds up a hand in apology. “It’s just – Papyrus, it’s about Rudy.”
Papyrus has already realized that by now, she can tell, but the sympathy that colors his face as he steps back towards her again is a reassurance nonetheless. “OH,” he says, and it’s just one word, but Carol has never been one for beating around the bush, anyhow.
“You don’t need to concern yourself with it,” she says. “You have a brother, and a home, and you need a good night’s sleep. I need to keep an eye on this town. You don’t.”
“I NEED TO KEEP AN EYE ON YOU,” Papyrus counters again. The unspoken meaning of his words is like a weight in her chest. “YOU’RE WORKING YOURSELF DOWN TO THE BONE – PUN NOT INTENDED –” (though the shadow of a smile tugs at the corners of his cheekbones nonetheless) “AND FRANKLY, IF NO ONE ELSE IS GOING TO BE ABLE TO WORRY FOR YOU, I MIGHT AS WELL!!”
“Papyrus,” she says, and she understands, she really does. “It is my job to keep the people of this town happy. You know that. It is my job to keep Noelle happy. When Rudy – passes, I need to be there to sweep up the collateral.” Each word comes plainly, though she can hear the distant voice in her mind chanting weak weak weak and the threat of tears stinging in her eyes. “You don’t.”
Papyrus opens his mouth and closes it promptly thereafter, and Carol can almost hear him telling her she deserves to be happy too, that he wants to be able to make her happy, not because it’s his job, but because he’s her friend. She knows Papyrus well enough by now, and they can read each other like mutual open books. It’s the reason why Papyrus shakes his head and doesn’t say a word, the reason why he sets a hand over hers, the reason why she lets him take the paper from her hand – the one that spells out the next brick she’ll need to replace in Hometown’s infrastructure to keep it from crumbling down to pieces.
“HOW IS NOELLE?” he asks, instead.
“I don’t know.” It’s all the answer she has to give. “I can’t let her get too involved, not with all of –” she gestures vaguely with her free hand, to the papers strewn about her own desk and to the letter Papyrus has procured, “this, and certainly not with the Dreemurr case. I can’t let her end up like December, Papyrus, I just – it’s for her own good.” It’s more of a reassurance to herself than to Papyrus. Papyrus has heard this all before – he was there for the day they’d all wandered into the woods to look for December, the day Noelle had come into her office and she’d shut the door because she couldn’t handle letting the girl know what’d happened to her own sister, the day she’d fought with Rudolph at the hospital because he was accepting flowers from the very man that she knew had to have torn her daughter away from them, the day she’d come home and Noelle was sitting on the doorstep because she was too nervous to ask her own mother for the keys.
(It was okay, she’d told herself that week, it was okay and it was fine. She knew Papyrus wasn’t convinced back then, and she knows he certainly isn’t now, but she can’t let the mask drop. She simply can’t.)
Half of her wishes it was Rudy’s hand over her’s instead of Papyrus’. The other half of her – the half that’s here in the present – knows better. It’s run its course, the rush of young love. Those days are fuzzy and faint in her mind, anyhow, like old film. It’s difficult to believe they exist, sometimes, because she doesn’t have any mementos of the time she spent there and the physical mementos of what should have been loving touch are relegated to the here and now. The spaces between are impossible to bring to mind, too – she knows they’re there, but when she tries to imagine driving down the road and out of Hometown to the city without looking back, the road starts and ends with Hometown. It’s unreal, she thinks aside, like the memories don’t exist unless she’s looking at them.
Perhaps it’s better to think of them that way.
She hasn’t changed a bit, not really. Still the same hot piece of work she’s always been.
Her shadow looms over the little room, overshadowed in its presence only by the flickering of the hospital lights. She’s not tall, per se – Rudy always towered over the gal even back in college (cuz, see, that’s where Noelle got her height from), and he still would now if he had the get-up-and-go to tower over anyone these days in the first place. She’s strong, though, strong and a far cry from her scrawny husband and daughter. Her glasses shine in the reflection of the occasional fluorescents, obscuring her gaze and making it even trickier for Rudy to get a read on her expression than usual.
It’s the rest of her that does that for him. Her hair, blonde and positively massive, sticks out at odd angles and lets him know she’s been back to her habit of running her hands through it whenever she doesn’t know what to do with them. Her tie hangs loose around her neck. Her dress shirt is stained with the reminder of a spilled cup of hot cocoa, coming untucked from her striped work pants. Her stress is palpable in the air around her, as intense and icy-cold as she is, and only makes itself more evident as she makes her way over to the little chair next to his bed and sits down without so much as a word of greeting.
She doesn’t need to say it – it’s him who’s dying in the first place, and she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t get the letter. If you need to see her, her secretary had said, try causing some terrible crisis. The irony would’ve been a real hoot if the situation wasn’t quite literally killing him.
He gets it, he really does. He knows she can’t afford to let this town fall apart, knows that deep down she’s still got that rock-solid sense of personal justice that wouldn’t let her give up December without a fight. She’s all ice and snow and wintery-cold things against Rudy’s warm and comforting and small-town homey, and that balance works well enough when they’re both able to keep it up.
But when they aren’t both able to, well –
Things feel off, sometimes, in the hospital. He thinks it might be what Noelle calls one of those liminal spaces, an in-between place that’s bound to disorient you seeing it out of its – what was it again? – everyday context.
“It’s funny,” Carol says, in a way that doesn’t sound like she finds it all that funny, “I don’t remember how you got this ill in the first place.”
“That makes two of us, sweetheart,” Rudy chuckles. A light flickers to life and then dies again with a nasty, meaty snap of wires. “I really wish I wasn’t.”
She should look like an angel, haloed in the singular light that remains, and she kind of does. There’s something inherently human – well, monster, but that’s how the saying goes – about her, though, the picked-down cuticles on her fingers, the way her breath rises and falls as she sets her chin against her hands. He’s always appreciated that about her. He’d seen the movies, plenty of ‘em, where the glasses-wearing, buck-toothed nerd goes through some kind of plastic surgery as soon as they put on a dress. Carol was never any of that, and he liked her that way – she could put on the nicest suit this side of Hometown and she’d still have the same taped-up glasses and slight lisp that’d made his heart do cartwheels when she’d scolded him for being a sleaze back in the good ol’ days.
(If only he could remember half the good ol’ days. His age must really be catching up to him – or maybe it’s the mystery illness.)
A tear rolls down her cheek. “Damnit.” Another. “Angel – Damnit.”
Rudy reaches over and sets his hand against hers, near her cheek. “It’s gonna be okay,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say. There isn’t anything else he could say – I love you, maybe, but what better would that do? “It’ll be okay. I’ll make it.”
“Noelle doesn’t deserve to be alone with me, but – this town’s gonna kill her, too.” She says it like it's a forgone conclusion, like she knows that in the back of her mind there’s only so much she can do and not-do, not-tell. Her voice cracks, thin ice under the weight of those who wandered too far out onto it. “You know I’m not a mom, Rudolph.”
“I know.” He doesn’t remember how they got from point A to point B, from dating to married with kids. Neither of them were ever the type. “I know.”
“I should be telling this to Alphys. I should –” her breath hitches and she pulls it back, harsh on the reigns. “I should be telling this to Toriel, at least she doesn’t –” Another intake of breath. Her hand shakes under his, but when he starts to pull it away, she pushes back against it.
“Asgore’s my friend, sweetheart,” he says. She already knows, of course, or else she wouldn’t be keeping a dying man at arm’s length.
“That’s your right,” she answers. He doesn’t blame her for it – if he thought Asgore had really killed their daughter, he’d be just as curt with anyone who dared fraternize with the guy. The problem is, though, that he just doesn’t. “That’s your right, Rudolph.” She’s reassuring herself, he thinks, more than she’s reassuring him.
Her thumb prods at the back of his hand, looping around it to keep it where it is. He feels the blunt nail at the end of it dig into the skin beneath his fur. It isn’t a violent touch, no, just an attempt to bring everything back into focus, to find the reason why they’d fallen in love in the first place. He wishes he could do it for her – but maybe that’s why they’re together, two people who feel like they’ve only got half a life to show for themselves.
“I love you,” he finally says, weak and earnest in the same breath. His lips meet the back of her hand.
When she looks at him again, the ice shatters underneath her.